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Paul Feldman

Academy Professor and Research Professor, Physics and Astronomy

Paul D. Feldman has been with the Department of Physics and Astronomy since 1967. His recent work has been in space ultraviolet astronomy and spectroscopy. He is principal investigator of a NASA-supported sounding rocket program and has been responsible for over three dozen sounding rocket launches primarily for the study of the Earth's upper atmosphere, the aurora and the airglow, the atmospheres of comets and planets, the spectra of hot stars, and cosmic background radiation. This program also developed the UVX experiment which flew on the Space Shuttle Columbia in January 1986. He was principal investigator for a program of comet studies (which included comet Halley in 1985-1986) using the International Ultraviolet Explorer satellite observatory. Feldman is a co-investigator on the team which developed the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope for FUV astronomy as part of the Astro payload that flew on the space shuttle in December 1990 and again in March 1995. He is a general observer with the Hubble Space Telescope and served on the Space Telescope Users Committee from 1992 to 1995. He is also a member of the FUSE science team and a co-investigator on the HST Advanced Camera for Surveys.

Feldman received his PhD in physics from Columbia University in 1964. Before coming to Johns Hopkins, he was an instructor at Columbia University (1964–1965) and an E. O. Hulburt Fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory (1965–1967). He has been an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellow (1969–1974), is a fellow of the American Physical Society, and is a member of the American Astronomical Society, American Geophysical Union, and International Astronomical Union. He has served as an Associate Editor of Journal of Geophysical Research-Space Physics, and as a member of the Editorial Board of Icarus, and was a member of the Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration of the National Academy of Sciences' Space Science Board from 1985 to 1988.